Sudanese extremist group claims killing of US diplomat
January 4, 2008 (CAIRO) — Unknown extremist group calling itself Ansar al-Tawhid has claimed the New Year’s Day murder of a US diplomat in Sudan in a statement posted in the chat room of a Web site used by militants, a group that monitors such sites said Friday.
The SITE Intelligence Group said it couldn’t authenticate the claim, purportedly from a group calling itself Ansar al-Tawhid, or Companions of Monotheism.
The statement was posted in the discussion forum of a Web site commonly used by militants, not as an official statement on the site.
“Because there is a claim of responsibility, we chose to send it out to our subscribers,” SITE Institute director Rita Katz told The Associated Press. Katz said that she had never heard of the group.
John Granville, an official for the U.S. Agency for International Development, was being driven home around 4 a.m. Tuesday when his car was cut off by another vehicle and came under fire, according to the Sudanese Interior Ministry. He was hit by five bullets and died after surgery. His driver, Abdel-Rahman Abbas, was also killed.
Sudanese officials insist the shooting wasn’t a terrorist attack, but the U.S. Embassy said it was too soon to determine the motive.
FBI investigators are in Khartoum working with Sudanese security agencies to investigate the attack, which was the first assassination of a U.S. diplomat in Sudan since 1973.
“The soldiers of Tawhid carried out an operation of killing the American diplomat and his Sudanese driver who sold his religion for few benefits of life,” the online statement said in the translation from the Arabic by SITE.
The statement also asked God to accept the Khartoum operation for “His Cause.”
It accused “the global infidels” of attacking the Islamic nation “in collaboration with the people of disagreement and hypocrisy to drive people away from Allah, humiliate men, dishonour the Muslim women and raise the cross over the land of Sudan.”
But “the soldiers of Tawhid swore to Allah to defend their religion,” it added.
The Sudanese interior ministry has said the diplomatic car was caught up in a fight which broke out as some Sudanese were out on the street celebrating the New Year.
In Washington, the State Department said it wasn’t aware of any claim of responsibility in the slaying.
“At this point we don’t have any clearer picture (of what happened),” spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.
Relations between Sudan and the United States have long been strained, most recently over the near five-year conflict in the western region of Darfur over which Washington has accused Khartoum of genocide.
Some information for this report provided by AFP and AP.